Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.
In “The Wikipedia Revolution,” Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia — edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers — came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn’t Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.
Mr. Lih’s book is somewhat like Wikipedia itself — there is much of interest, a certain amount of material that only specialists will love and some content that is better covered elsewhere. Jeff Howe, in “Crowdsourcing” (2008), gives a much fuller account of the history of open-source software and content. Appropriately, the afterword to “The Wikipedia Revolution” is written by Wikipedia users offering a “prognosis” for the site: The users point to the pitfalls of Wikipedia’s “uneven development,” noting that “the biography of Britney Spears takes up nearly twice the space as the one for Socrates.” Whomever this leaves short-changed is, of course, a matter of personal opinion; the Wikipedians, following their site’s “neutral point of view” rule, make no judgment.
It is clear by the end of “The Wikipedia Revolution” that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when “dominant encyclopedias” were still hiding behind “paid fire walls” — and some still are — Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google.
